Are you meeting your marketing goals and objectives? Google Analytics Goals and Funnels can help you track visitor actions and make corrections to your current marketing strategies or website design if you’re coming up short. You have the option to set up different types of goals for varying purposes. Once you have a goal set in place, a conversion is logged each time a visitor completes the required action, allowing you to monitor activity with Goal Reports, Site Search Reports, Traffic Reports and much more.
Here’s how you do it.
Steps to Setting up Goals in Google Analytics
Your first order of business is to define the goals you wish to set up; these will vary depending on your website. This is very important because the factors that determine success on one particular company may be vastly different from another. For example, you may want to measure enquiries rather than shopping cart access, so you want to set up a goal based on what determines your site’s success.
Potential Goals:
- How long a visitor stays on your site– Useful if you sell ad space.
- Inquiry form completes– Sometimes contact information for visitors is more valuable (particularly for lead gen companies).
- Shopping cart purchases– E-commerce sites will need this information.
When you have decided on the best goal for your site, it is time to login to Google analytics. Go into Admin and then choose the correct profile (if you have more than one) and select the edit option, which should lead to a drop down menu of options, including “Goals.”
Once you click on Goals, you will come to a page with different goal sets. There are four sets, each with options for five goals. If this is your first visit, click on + Add Goal in the first set.
Now it is time to select a name for your goal. This should not be too difficult but you do want to ensure it will not cause confusion in the future so keep it simple. Once it is named, you can activate the goal by clicking “On” and set the goal position as Set 1, Goal 1. Goal number one is the macro or primary goal.
In the next step, it is time to select a goal type based on what you hope to monitor. Under goal types, you will have four options:
- URL Destination
- Time on Site
- Pages/Visit
- Event
After you choose your goal type, you will then see a section called Goal Details, which is where you create the basic setting for the goal. Each of the goal types will have different goal detail options.
When you want to track visitors who see a specific page, use URL Destination. You will have another decision to make at this point about the type of match you will make.
These choices will be:
- Exact Match– When your goal page is a static URL such as a “contact us” page.
- Head Match– When the goal page requires URL variables that change.
- Regular Expression Match– If there is a possibility there could be a change at the start of your URL.
Next, you will enter your site’s URL under “goal URL.”
At this point, you will set up the desired time limit for your goals. For instance, you will be able to figure out if a visitor is spending time watching videos, browsing photos or interacting on your site. When you come to the Time on Site selection you will choose Greater than or Less than, followed by the number of seconds, minutes, and/or hours you would like to track.
You can also track the number of page views each unique visitor has. Simply:
- Pages Visited
- Select Greater than or Less than
- Enter number of pages you want to track
Now you have the option to place a value on your goals, which should closely approximate what you think each desired action translates to in dollars. This is an optional feature and in most cases, it requires quite a bit of data to determine what the monetary translation is for a single action. However, if you have the information and the calculations this can be a fantastic part of the Google Analytics Goals.
When you have all the information set in place, click Save Goal at the bottom of the page and you are done!
[MORE: Linking Google AdWords and Analytics]
Google Analytics Funnels
Goals are quite important but you cannot really talk about them without considering funnels. This is an optional feature that allows you to follow the path each visitor takes to wind up on a specific page of your website. Using a funnel will allow you to see if all visitors are using the same path to your site. This means you can set up more than one funnel per goal. Of course, you may want to keep it simple and avoid potential confusion by limiting the funnels to 2 per goal. For instance you may want to track how people are downloading a particular file from your site – is it from the home page or from an internal article page?
There are two funnels to choose from, a Sales Funnel or a Conversion Funnel. As you can imagine, with a conversion funnel you will not be looking at how sales are reached, but how visitors reach a specific non-sales area such as newsletter sign-ups or content downloads. Sales Funnels, on the other hand, are definitely aimed at following how visitors get to the goal of completing an order.
After your Google Analytics Goals and Funnels are firmly in place you are ready to begin generating reports, such as the Funnel Visualization report. This will map the entire process and is a valuable tool in determining where there is a drop-off from one step to the next. Information of this nature will help you know where to fine-tune your site or marketing. It is important to note that funnels are not retroactive; they will begin tracking details only from the moment they go live forward.
As you will quickly see, the report is actually a timeline chart and flow diagram based on the parameters you have decided upon. A lot of valuable information can be found in these reports, such as:
- How many visitors entered your site at a particular area
- How many then go on to the next stage (or parameter you set)
- Where people are leaving the process
- Where visitors who are leaving are going
You can access the Funnel Visualization report by logging in to your account and clicking Goals, under Conversions.
*NOTE: When you wish to start a funnel, click on the Edit link next to the specific Goal you want a funnel for, then click “yes” to create the funnel for the goal.
Using Funnels Effectively
A very common problem when it comes to Funnels is improper interpretation of the Funnel Visualization Report. If you are not properly interpreting the data you will come to the wrong conclusions and can make some bad marketing choices.
A prime example of misinterpretation is mistaking the top numbers, which refer to page views, as the number of visitors. As you probably already know, page views and visitors are not nearly the same thing.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that the Funnel Visualization report only shows the order of the funnel steps you have set up, not necessarily the actual conversion path your visitor has taken. In some cases, you may have a visitor who has gone back to a previous page, but your report does not reflect that information. Your visitor could, in all fairness, simply head back to the home page after finishing with your shopping cart.
There are many factors that can result in misinterpretation of the Funnel Visualization report. These can include:
- Failure to segment funnel data
- Ignoring problems with data sampling
- Using large data sets and small time frames
What are some other reasons for an ineffective funnel?
- Incorrect REGEX for Goal and Funnel pages
- Failure to test the funnel setup
- Failure to understand the required first step
- Assigning monetary values to Goals that are transactional
You need all the information to make good decisions about how to structure your site or marketing efforts. If you do not know what type of visitor you are dealing with (did they come from email, social media, organic search or paid search?) how can you make informed decisions?
This is a guest post by Alpesh Karodiwal, an internet marketing specialist at Shivam Technologies, an innovative internet marketing company based in Australia that specializes in helping start-ups and Fortune 500 companies grow their social media and search marketing presence. Follow him on Twitter: @SEO_Profesional.
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.